MetaCommunications Announces First Intranet Search and Archive Management System for Creative Workgroups

BOSTON, Mass. -- July 11, 2005 -- MetaCommunications, Inc., a leading developer of business management and workflow solutions for the graphic arts industry, today announced the availability of Digital Storage Manager, the first Intranet search and archive management system for creative workgroups. A powerful and intuitive product, Digital Storage Manager solves a few of the industry’s most challenging problems -- finding, tagging and archiving the myriad files used in the production process.

“Graphic arts organizations are under tremendous pressure to increase efficiency and profitability,” said Robert T. Long, executive vice president of MetaCommunications. “Digital Storage Manager significantly reduces the time, labor, and costs required to manage the ever-growing cache of production files. Our innovative, cost-efficient Intranet search and archive management system puts a ‘high beam’ on Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger, enabling creative professionals to take the ability to find, tag and archive beyond the desktop to an entire workgroup’s network.”

Find, Tag, Archive

Every day, creative workgroups generate thousands of digital files, such as images, logos, PDFs, and photos used to produce advertisements, brochures, direct mail, product packaging, and Web pages, among other types of art. Historically, these creative, prepress, and publishing files have been either saved on local computers or stored haphazardly on various fileservers or offline media such as tape or CD. Because the files have been assigned little or no metadata -- pertinent descriptive information about the files, such as authors, customer and job information, copyright information, formats, locations, size, versions, etc. -- it has been difficult for colleagues to access the files for use and re-use.

According to GISTICS research, an average of $8,200 per person per year is spent on file management activities, which include searching, verifying, organizing, and archiving files. Creative professionals spend an average of one out of every 10 hours of their time on file management. Searches alone account for a full third of that time.

Digital Storage Manager solves this problem by providing a unique database file system that represents a centralized view of an entire network’s online and offline production files, real-time indexing of the files’ uses, customizable metadata tags, online and offline file search and retrieval, and one-step archiving and backup.

Digital Storage Manager’s array of benefits derives from its unique strengths in the functions of finding, tagging, and archiving files:

Find: The out-of-the-box, turnkey system, which is built on proven technology in MetaCommunications’ award-winning Virtual Ticket product, enables users to quickly and easily search across an entire network of online servers and offline repositories to accurately find any file regardless of location.

Digital Resource Explorer: Online production servers are automatically indexed by server agents, creating a mirror of pointers to actual files. Users can use customizable file tickets to quickly and easily add metadata to individual files or entire folders in real-time. Digital Storage Manager automatically captures file metadata and preview information from the most commonly used creative tools in the industry. Files or folders can be archived by selecting items in the window.

Production Jobs: This view enables users to manage files and folders as a job. Jobs can be assigned metadata which is automatically propagated to each file belonging to the job. A job can either be archived immediately from this window or a date can be set for it to be archived later.

Digital Resource Search: Production users can search across online and offline storage to find files based on standard file metadata, customized job and file metadata or the contents of many file types. Searches can either be saved by each user or published to groups of users.

Cataloging: This window allows users to bring legacy files into the system.

Retrieval Request Queue: This window enables archivists to easily manage and fulfill requests for offline media and automatically notify individuals when their request is complete.

Archiving Queue: This window provides a workflow for batch archiving of files and editing of metadata. It also enables archivists to manage online archives, and back up and archive files to offline media in one simple step for disaster recovery.

Digital Storage Manager has an SDK for integration with third party systems including FileMaker Pro. Production systems may be queried for metadata and applied to files or folder automatically.

A Digital Storage Manager Web Server is also available to customers who wish to provide restricted, browser-based file access to external departments, customers and vendors.

Pricing and Availability

Digital Storage Manager offers enterprise technology at a desktop price. The product is licensed by the total storage under management. Mac OS X and Web client access is unlimited. MetaCommunications is offering introductory pricing through October 31, 2005 starting at $995 for 100 GB of managed storage. Pricing for storage increments of 250 GB, 1 TB, 2.5 TB, 5 TB, and unlimited are available. For more information, call 800-771-6382, e-mail sales@meta-comm.com or visit http://www.meta-comm.com.

About MetaCommunications

MetaCommunications is a leading software developer of workgroup and enterprise business management and workflow solutions for the graphic arts industry. MetaCommunications’ products include Virtual Ticket 6.0, Job Manager 3.5 and Digital Storage Manager. These cross-platform products are customizable and scalable from five-user workgroups to hundreds of users in an enterprise environment. For more information, please visit http://www.meta-comm.com.